Microsoft Confirms IE11 Will Support Google’s SPDY Protocol

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In a press briefing this afternoon, Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 11 will support SPDY, the Google-backed protocol for speeding up download speeds for web sites. Microsoft only briefly talked about this in its briefing and didn’t even mention it in its announcement, but this is actually a major step for SPDY, which is now supported in all of the mainstream browsers.

This move will surely also get more web developers to look into supporting SPDY on their servers now that almost 100 percent of the user base will be able to make use of this protocol in the near future (except, of course, those who are still using IE7).

WebGL, Too, But No WebRTC

Earlier today, Microsoft announced that it would support hardware-accelerated WebGL in IE11. Indeed, the company is clearly stressing the fact that hardware acceleration is built directly into IE11, while other vendors haven’t yet focused on this so far. Microsoft argues that by just focusing on one platform, it’s able to deliver better performance, because it doesn’t have to compromise.

With WebGL and SPDY, Microsoft is clearly getting behind a number of open standards. The one that’s still missing, though, is WebRTC. Microsoft has decided to back its own proprietary version of this standard, even though Chrome and Firefox now use WebRTC in their stable releases.